Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

I didn’t like the way she said “you say you saw,” but I nodded. I was pretty sure at this point that if I went through this again, my head would explode. Nothing seemed real anymore. But they weren’t going to let me go until I did this. So we went through it a third time, this time concentrating solely on the man. We went into even deeper detail—the size of his eyes (medium), the depth of his eyes (deep, I guessed), wrinkles (none, really), the size of his lips (normal), the shape of his eyebrows (slightly arched), his weight (normal, maybe a little thin). It was only when we got to the color of his skin (white) that something stood out.

“He seemed very . . . gray,” I said. “Kind of pale. Or sick.”

“So he was a Caucasian man with a pallor?”

It was more than that, though. His skin and his eyes didn’t match. His eyes were so bright and clear to me, but the rest of him . . . the rest of him hardly seemed to matter. It was like I forgot the rest of his body.

The E-fit produced something that looked like a cartoon, specifically, like an older, more evil Charlie Brown. In reality, the man’s head wasn’t so smooth. Not that it was lumpy, either, but skulls have textures that are hard to explain.

Detective Young looked at the image with a resigned expression.

“All right,” she said. “For now, you should go back to your building. But make sure to stay around today. Don’t leave the campus area.”

By the time I stepped outside, it was fully daylight and there were television trucks all over the square, pulling up on the sidewalks, taking up every available space. Police officers in bright neon Windbreakers were moving around them, telling drivers to move, pointing camera people away from the school. A female reporter immediately descended on me.

“Were you in there talking to the police?” she asked.

“I just saw a guy,” I mumbled.

“You saw someone?”

“I—”

“What exactly did you see?” Suddenly, there were two cameras in my face, blinding me with their lights. I was about to answer when two police officers hurried over, one sticking her hand over the camera lens.

“You lot, you stop filming now ,” she barked. “I want to see all your footage—”

“We have every right—”

“You,” the other officer said to me, “get back to your house.”

As I hurried off, the cameras followed me, and the reporter called, “What’s your name? Your name?”

I didn’t answer. Call Me Claudia was standing in the door of Hawthorne, and this time, I was happy to see her. As I left, I was sure that the cameras trained on my fleeing figure got some really excellent footage of my butt hustling through the rain in my alligator pajamas.

14

JAZZA WAS PACING OUR ROOM WHEN I RETURNED. She had her pink piggy mug out, which was the tea mug she reserved for times of extreme stress.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. “You were gone for ages!”

“It was fine,” I said. “They just asked me a lot of questions.”

Jazza didn’t ask if I’d said anything about her. Instead, she waved me over to the window.

“I can’t believe this is happening. Just look out there.”

We both knelt on the spare bed we had pushed against the wall and were using as a sofa. It was right under our middle window. Through the rain-streaked glass, we saw the white-suited figures coming in and out of the white tent. More lights were set up. More people arrived. More cameras and police and police tape.

This activity remained the focus of the next few hours, with the occasional break to drink tea. Since the view from our room was so good, lots of people from the other side of the hall came in to have a look. The view out the windows was actually a lot more interesting than the news—in fact, it was the news. The news cameras filmed our buildings and the little tent until the police moved them back and set up a cordon around the campus, stranding us on a little island of activity.

Eventually, we all found ourselves crowded into the common room, staring at the television. Every once in a while, the news would fill us in on some aspect of what was going on outside. The victim was female again. Her name was Catherine Lord. She worked at a pub in the City. She had last been seen leaving after they closed at midnight. A coworker had walked her to her car. CCTV had caught her car pulling away. Footage from various traffic cameras tracked her from there. She had not driven home. Instead, she had driven to the location of the fourth murder. Her empty car had been found three streets away from Wexford, and while there was a partial CCTV record of her walking away from it, no one could explain what she was doing or where she was going. The news showed a picture of her, taken earlier that evening. Catherine Lord had been beautiful, with bright strawberry blond hair, and she looked barely older than us. She wore a white Victorian-style dress with a tight bodice and lots of lace. Her pub had been hosting a Ripper night special, and she and all the other bar staff were in costume. The news couldn’t get enough of this—a pretty girl in a Victorian dress. The perfect victim.

That girl had died just outside my door. It was possible she was still in that white tent. Her dress would no longer be white.

“Julianne,” Claudia said, appearing at the door, “come here, please.”

Jazza looked at me, then stood and went out of the room. She was still gone when we were all taken over to lunch as a group soon after. It was absolutely pouring now, but that didn’t slow down any of the activity outside. The police had moved the media away. We could see them all huddled down at the end of the street, held off by a few police officers. They had their cameras trained on us, beckoning us to come closer. To combat this, the school was making a bunch of teachers stand out in the rain and haul anyone back who wanted to go be on television. The police had more or less taken over the streets and the square. It was now a given that we would only be permitted to go from our dorms to the dining hall or library. Any attempt to walk in any other direction was met by flailing arms and a shooing motion.

The dining hall staff, to their credit, had risen to the occasion and had cooked not only for us, but for the police outside. There were extra urns of hot coffee and tea, trays of muffins and sandwiches, as well as the usual offerings. Today, it was some kind of limp pasta with a pink sauce, a stewlike thing of lamb and peas, and a tray of hamburgers. I had no appetite at all, but I grabbed one just to have something on my tray. Andrew and Jerome were already there, and they waved me over to sit with them.

“Where’s Jazza?” Andrew asked.

“Talking to Claudia, or . . . someone. I’m not sure.”

Jerome looked at me. He had undoubtedly already done the “we crossed the square at the same time the murder happened” math, or maths as they insisted on calling it here. He looked at my untouched burger, and I think he knew—not exactly what had happened, but certainly that something wasn’t good.

Jazza joined us a few minutes later.

“All right?” Jerome asked.

“Fine,” she said, a fake breeziness in her voice. “It’s all fine.”

After a half hour, we were all herded up again, the girls first. Outside, the police parade was still going on. A third mobile forensics unit van had joined the two that had been here most of the morning, and there were police with plastic rain slickers on walking the green in a long line—about thirty of them—taking every step together, examining the ground as they went.

As we came up to Hawthorne, there was a policeman standing in the middle of the road outside. He was tall and very young-looking, with black glasses. His face was long and thin, with pronounced cheekbones and long hollows under them. Even though he had the fluorescent green police jacket and the signature high black helmet and all the stuff that said POLICE, he didn’t seem like a policeman. His black hair was just a little too long, his face a little too fresh, his bearing a little too self-conscious.